VIDEO - INFLUENCED BY DE PALMA, CARPENTER, DISCUSSES SPLIT DIOPTER SHOT AS TOOL OF THE CINEMA
#3 on Film Comment's Best Films of 2025:
Leave it to Kleber Mendonça Filho, a filmmaker for whom cinema feels as essential as breathing, to craft a political thriller that is equally steeped in the techniques of its classic-movie inspirations and the everyday atmospheres and textures of 1970s Brazil. Photographed in widescreen Panavision, and featuring De Palma–style split-diopter shots, Altmanesque zooms, and wipe transitions straight out of Star Wars, The Secret Agent is packed with period-perfect details and held together by Wagner Moura’s soulful performance as a scientist and father caught in the murderous headlights of Brazil’s military dictatorship. But this is also a movie that keeps wandering around—“a bit improvised, Brazilian-style,” as one character says. Mendonça is fascinated by how the history and tools of cinema become an archive; the film finds its most arresting images and moral conscience in all the supposedly unnecessary, extra stuff of life that one might imagine any other filmmaker excising from the record.—Michael Blair